Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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Liam Byrne is right – we need 'radical reform' of the initiative-zapping, soul-destroying welfare state

The Left won't thank him for it, but in the Guardian Liam Byrne has tried to kickstart a potentially interesting debate about the welfare state. For many well-off Liberal commentators – who, notably, have no interaction with the welfare state, except in the sense that buddies of theirs probably manage huge chunks of it for a fat wage packet – the welfare state is a sacred thing and criticism of it is the equivalent of blasphemy. Yet Byrne surely has a point when he says the welfare state is in need of "radical reform" and we should seriously explore how to get "communities working again". Indeed, I would go further and say that the expansion of the welfare state into more and more areas of less well-off people's lives is one of the worst developments of recent years, seriously zapping resourcefulness and social solidarity from working-class communities.

Byrne's mistake is that he seems motivated by a narrow desire to save the state money. The financial cost of social welfare is "simply too high", he says, and we should "bring down [the] benefits bill to help pay down the national debt". That is a Scrooge's approach to the problem of the welfare state. The really terrible cost of ever-expanding welfarism is measured not in cash, but in the impact welfarism has on working communities, on those who have been made increasingly reliant upon the charity, largesse and therapeutic meddling of the massive and monolithic welfare machine. Relentless financial and therapeutic intervention by the state into poor people's lives has, not surprisingly, had a pretty devastating impact both on social interaction and individual aspiration.

When people come to be more reliant on the state than they are on each other, community bonds fray and social solidarity falls into disrepair. When the struggling mum looks to the state for help, rather than turning to family, friends, neighbours, the end result is that she becomes more isolated from her community. When a 17-year-old school student short of cash turns to the state for a weekly handout, he never really develops skills of self-sufficiency or dependency on friends and neighbours. When young men looking for work know that the state will sustain them for long periods of time, especially if they make a performance of being "ill" or "depressed" at the dole centre, then their instinct to work becomes frayed. The old healthy working-class habits of pulling together, "getting on one's bike", offering one another work and advice have slowly but surely – and tragically – been replaced by the "helping hand" of the ever-watchful state. People start to rely less on their own wits and mates, and more on the faceless keepers of charitable cash.

The clearest way in which the welfare state decommissions men and women, turning them from active citizens into passive dependants, is in its dishing-out of incapacity benefit. Hundreds of thousands of people are now defined by the welfare state as "incapable" of working. No doubt some of these people really can't work, but there are many more healthy and fit and once-aspirant men and women who have simply been convinced that they can't work. The welfare state’s patronising promotion of the idea of widespread incapacity, its cultivation of the idea that huge swathes of the working classes are not fit for purpose, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people start to believe that they really are useless. The radical Left once believed in the power of the working man not only to hold down a job but also to remake society and the future – to watch them now fight tooth-and-nail in defence of the idea that much of the working class is pathetic and weak and in need of permanent care by the welfare state is genuinely depressing.

It is always those with ample cash and cushy jobs who rush to defend the welfare state. That's because they have no idea what living under the welfare state is like, and how harshly it impacts on community life and the individual soul.